Society

Sunday

Kate Chisholm

The man who discovered Ebola | 1 February 2015

By some quirk of fate, just as news reached the papers that the Scottish nurse who had contracted Ebola while working in Sierra Leone was now recovered, the guest on that Radio 4 staple Desert Island Discs was the scientist who first identified the virus. This gave a programme that can seem rather outdated and superficial a whole new resonance, providing the back story to the news, adding that frisson of inquiry, of revelation. Did Professor Peter Piot, as a young researcher working at Antwerp’s Institute of Tropical Medicine almost 40 years ago, realise he was seeing something quite new and so dangerous? ‘It looked like war,’ he told Kirsty Young after

Saturday

Steerpike Steerpike

Benedict Cumberbatch: Pardon all gay men convicted under same law as Alan Turing

A screening of The Imitation Game hosted by the American ambassador Matthew Barzun saw Alan Turing’s nephew Sir John Dermot Turing and his great-niece Rachel Barnes welcomed to 24 Grosvenor Square. There Barzun spoke of the progress that both America and Britain have made with gay rights since Turing’s day. The wartime code-breaker committed suicide after he was found guilty of gross indecency and given chemical castration treatment as punishment. He was given a pardon for his ‘crime’ by the Queen in 2013. Now, members of the film’s cast have signed an open letter to the British government urging them to to pardon the estimated 49,000 men who were persecuted under the same law that Alan Turing was found guilty of. Mr S suspects

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Comparative advantage

From ‘Free Traders and Trade Problems’, The Spectator, 30 January 1915: There is every reason to believe that if the chemists of the country would now concentrate on these chemical problems, a solution would be found which would enable us to build up chemical industries capable of holding their own even against a German combine. In the long run it is only those industries which can bold their own that this nation wants. If, through any special capacity that our competitors possess, they are able permanently to produce any particular article of a better quality or at a lower price than we can produce it ourselves, it is to our

Friday

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Is it just on women’s issues that politicians feel they must deal with the pundits?

Bit of a coup for Sarah Vine, Daily Mail columnist (and wife of Michael Gove), don’t you think? Her piece on date rape elicited a trenchant response from Harriet Harman, who was indeed mentioned in it. I can’t think of many politicians who get down and dirty with a columnist like that; mostly they loftily ignore the brickbats or deal only indirectly with the pundits by countering their arguments without attribution. Anyway, remarkably, Ms Harman isn’t letting this one go. Let me rehearse the arguments. Ms Vine had taken issue with the latest observations of the  Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, who declared that men must be able to

Steerpike Steerpike

Is the dream over? Russell Brand and Johann Hari go their separate ways

Russell Brand and Johann Hari were once the revolutionary dream team, working side-by-side to produce the comedian’s YouTube series The Trews. Brand hired the self-confessed plagiarist last year to help with his videos. Now, alas, Mr S hears it is the end of the road for the like-minded pair, with Hari quitting. The writer apparently wants to focus on his next book. Hari had previously worked with Brand while also working on his most recent release Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. Their working relationship had been an amiable one, with Brand even acknowledging the discredited journalist in the credits for his book Revolution, calling him a ‘tireless, brilliant, adrenalised busybody’. Mr S

Tom Chivers

No, cats did not smell your cancer

No, they bloody didn’t. They just didn’t. ‘Cats detected my cancer’, reads a headline on Mail Online. But, let’s face it, they didn’t at all. The ways in which this story is nonsense are obvious. Stephanie Doody, the woman in question, says (and, I’m sure, believes – and may even be right) that her three cats, whose names are not important but are dutifully reported in the story because of Human Interest, started behaving oddly and prodding her stomach. This, she also says and also no doubt believes (but in this case she is wrong) alerted her to the rare tumour on her appendix, a type which usually goes undetected

Dennis Sewell

The Conservatives will lose votes if they fail to defend their school reforms

We can be sure that between now and May there will be an endless barrage of lies and disinformation aimed at belittling this government’s achievements in improving schools. The real danger is not that these arguments will be persuasive, but that they will not be rebutted. It sometimes seems as if the government has lost faith in its own successful reforms. Where Tristram Hunt was poised ready to pounce, misrepresenting the committee’s report the moment it was published (in fact, he was at it the day before it was published!), Nicky Morgan has been recorded as absent once again. It may be that the new Education Secretary has orders from

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

A mother’s choice: kill oneself or be ‘forced to work’

I suspect that you were as appalled as I by the plight of young mum, Marie Buchan, from Selly Oak in Birmingham. She has eight children – called stuff like Latoya and Tia – and currently claims a meagre £26,000 per year in benefits to feed them all. But now the government’s benefits cap has started to bite and Marie will see her income reduce to £23,000. She said: ‘I am being forced into work. You’re going to get similar cases as to what happened with the bedroom tax – people taking their own lives due to the financial pressures they are feeling. It will hit people that hard.’ You and

Steerpike Steerpike

Sheila Hancock: I don’t care if an actor is posh

Julie Walters added weight to Chris Bryant’s claim that British culture is dominated by the upper classes when she said that there are very few opportunities for working class actors today. Walter’s fellow actress Sheila Hancock, however, thinks it’s not worth getting her knickers in a twist about. ‘Are there a lot of posh actors? Yes. Are there more important things going on in this country? Yes,’ the actress told Mr S at the Political Book Awards. ‘I think the point Julie was making is that its the lack of government grants that existed when we were younger which no longer exist, which means often only the rich go to drama school.

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Germany shows her hand

From ‘The Running Fight in the North Sea’, The Spectator, 30 January 1915: THE splendid success of the battle-cruisers under Admiral Beatty in the North Sea last Sunday means much more than that they sunk the German armoured cruiser ‘Blücher,’ as well as a light cruiser, and very seriously damaged two German battle-cruisers. It means that we have a much better knowledge than before of what German tactics are likely to be, and what the German capacity is for fighting a superior force with an inferior force. The Germans are so fond of creating an atmosphere of mystery—of encouraging a belief that they have some miracle of inventiveness to spring upon

Thursday

Peter Jones

Syriza could have learned from Aristophanes. Instead it’s headed for Greek tragedy

The German chancellor Angela Merkel has expressed her desire for Greece to remain part of the European ‘story’. Since Greeks — together with the Romans and Jews — actually created that story over the past 2,500 years, it is hard to see how they could not. With help from the Romans, they laid the foundations of western history, philosophy, politics, education, architecture and literature, this last including epic, tragedy, lyric, pastoral and, especially, comedy. In facing up to Europe, Syriza has the potential to keep that comic tradition alive. Aristophanes’ comedies envisage the little man or woman heroically taking on the big boys and winning through against all the odds, celebrating victory

The Spectator

Spectator letters: Degrees, dishwashers, and charity catfights

What’s a degree worth? Sir: Mark Mason’s article (‘Uni’s out’, 24 January) hits the nail on the head. A brief addendum: it is generally stated that graduates earn more over a lifetime than non-graduates — obviously a selling point to would-be students. This claim may be true in a very crude sense, but is meaningless without certain crucial caveats. The main caveats are so obvious they barely need stating. It depends what you study (e.g. medicine vs media studies) and what university you go to. It depends on what class of degree you get (a lower second or less may prove a disqualification for entry to many professions and jobs). Finally — an

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 29 January 2015

If you and your partner ever want to improve your bidding system, I can’t recommend Phil King highly enough as a bridge coach. Catherine Seale and I booked him for a few sessions in preparation for last weekend’s Lady Milne trials, and although we didn’t qualify (my mistakes are too embarrassing to mention), we both benefitted hugely from his wonderfully methodical and lucid way of explaining how certain conventions work in practice. Phil has prepared pamphlets covering every aspect of bidding (slams, defence, competitive auctions etc.), full of real-life deals played by experts, so you and your partner can see how you fare by comparison. It’s pretty eye-opening to find

Taki

Those ancient Greeks were bores — but things are looking up

Thick snow is falling hard and heavy, muffling sounds and turning the picturesque village postcard beautiful. I am lying in bed listening to a Mozart version of ‘Ave Maria’, a heavenly soprano almost bringing tears to my eyes with the loveliness of it. This is the civilisation of our ancestors — one that gave us Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven and built cathedrals all over the most wondrous continent in the world. It is now being replaced by a higher one in which distinctions of ethnicity and religion will no longer be tolerated. The human race has a limitless capacity for self-improvement, and it shows where architecture, the arts and music

Jeremy Clarke

The risks of being an Englishman on Burns Night

I’m rubbish at public speaking and detest it. Even the thought of reciting an English poem of my choice at a Burns Night Supper cast a long shadow beforehand, in spite of the strong probability that everyone at the table would be blootered when the time came for me to get to my feet. A further problem was: which poem should an Englishman choose to read at a celebration of Scottishness, if not of Scottish nationalism? Should it perhaps be an English riposte? Or would something amiable and irrelevant be more politic? A comic poem maybe? A comic poem in a comic dialect? Lewis Carroll? ‘’Twas brillig’, and so on?

Melissa Kite

The dead iPad Sketch

My iPad is dead, that’s what’s wrong with it. The plumage don’t enter into it. But since the blasted thing fell off its perch last November, it has somehow run up crippling excess data charges. At first, I could think of only two possible explanations: either my iPad was pretending to be dead, while secretly downloading movies it personally fancied watching, or the phone company was overcharging me. All I could say with any certainty was that the iPad had been lying on a shelf, insensible, unchargable, un-switch-on-able throughout December, and then I got a bill showing that during this period of total inactivity it had apparently racked up more

Alexander Chancellor

You realise how little you know of anybody when they die

Whether or not you believe in the afterlife, death remains an impenetrable mystery. One moment a person is making jokes and comments and observations about life; the next he is gone. What has happened to that store of wit and wisdom acquired over a lifetime, to that particular way of understanding and looking at things, to that unique muddle of thoughts and feelings that every individual has? Even if someone has gone to heaven, it is difficult to imagine that he has taken these things with him. If he did, they would hardly be compatible with eternal rest. By my brother John’s bedside when he died, aged 87, on New

The Spectator

Female bishops are very, very old news

Female bishops The Reverend Libby Lane was ordained as Bishop of Stockport, the Church of England’s first female bishop. — By the time the first 32 female C of E vicars were ordained in 1994, the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts had had a female bishop, Barbara Harris, for five years. — Yet the first Anglican woman priest was ordained half a century earlier. Florence Li Tim-Oi had been deacon at Macao Protestant Chapel in the early 1940s. When the war prevented a priest travelling from Japanese-occupied territory to administer communion, Li Tim-Oi was ordained by the Bishop of Victoria on 25 January 1944. Cash or card? The managing director of Visa

Toby Young Toby Young

Come on, Tristram Hunt, if you think you’re hard enough

For a brief moment earlier this week, I thought education might become an issue in the general election campaign. The Commons Education Select Committee’s lukewarm report on the government’s academy and free school programmes was leaked to the Guardian on Monday and the accompanying story claimed that Labour hoped to open a ‘second front’ following the ‘success’ of its attacks over the NHS. ‘It is undeniable that the last Labour government dramatically improved school standards in secondary education,’ said Tristram Hunt, the shadow education secretary. ‘But the progress that we made… is being undone by a government that is obsessed with market ideology in education.’ Now, I would welcome this,

Dot Wordsworth

What Benedict Cumberbatch didn’t understand about ‘coloured’Photo: Getty

Benedict Cumberbatch apologised at length: ‘devastated’, ‘shaming’, ‘offended’, ‘inappropriate’. What had he done? Been caught in a compromising situation or stolen from a shop? No he had used the word coloured with reference to black people. It is the strongest current form of taboo, worse than defecating in public, though I admit that this would have quite an effect on an American chat show. It was in America that poor Mr Cumberbatch, the flawless actor, delivered the criminal word. It was so unfair. He had been arguing that black people get a raw deal in acting. He wouldn’t dream of using nigger — so taboo in America, and in many